How to Knit a Human: A memoir

By Anna Jacobson

I want to know what it was like to have crossed into the realm of madness. After all, I did it. I went mad. Why can' t I have the secret knowledge that comes with it?How do you write a memoir when your memories have been taken? She awakens in hospital, greeted by nurses and patients she doesn' t recognise, but who address her with familiarity. She decides to untangle the clues.How to Knit a Human is Anna' s quest to find her self and her memory after experiencing psychosis and Electroconvulsive therapy in 2011, at the age of twenty-three. As the memory barriers begin to crumble, Anna weaves her experiences around the gaps of memories that are still not accessible. Anna writes and creates art on her own terms. This book is a reclamation of story and self. How to Knit a Human is a precise and searching memoir that illuminates the fragile balance that can exist between memory and one' s sense of self. The writing reflects superbly on the profound impact of memory loss caused by psychosis and its treatment, and shows us how storytelling can form part of healing through the sharing of experiences and a deeper understanding of them.' — K ri G slason In this wise, wry and moving memoir Anna Jacobson reclaims her self from the institutions that sought to define her. As she asks vital questions about care, memory and inheritance, Jacobson reminds us of the recuperative joy of creative life.' — Mireille Juchau This book is a revelation. If Leonora Carrington teamed up with Janet Frame you might get something close to the kind, gentle, weird and brutal brilliance of How to Knit a Human. Anna Jacobson has shifted my perspective on art and illness. 100 stars. Bravo!' — Kris Kneen How to Knit a Human is a visceral and immersive memoir carefully crafted as well as genre-bending. Jacobson delves deep into her own unquiet mind only to emerge artistically victorious. A triumph.' — Lee Kofman Blazing, incantatory and furious, this is a work of unshakeable witness. Jacobson sorts through the shapes and shades of memory, dropped stitches and invisible repairs, to forge a blazing work of consolation and recuperation, a paean to resilience and creativity.' — Felicity Plunkett In How to Knit a Human, Anna Jacobson gives us a sheaf of home made X-rays that net interior light. Her ability to stand both inside and outside of memory as an encased form has allowed Anna a rare set of insights, something akin to planting seeds in the air, that initially subsist then quietly grow under the moisture in her own breath. As writer, artist and musician, it is fortunate that Anna has the intellectual, emotional, familial and spiritual machinery to approach memory (as itself and herself), in a way that she can watch the pieces of the existential jigsaw move inside the box without her even touching them.' — Nathan Shepherdson

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781742239934

Anna Jacobson

Anna Jacobson is an award-winning writer and artist from Brisbane. Amnesia Findings (UQP, 2019) is her first full-length poetry collection, which won the 2018 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. In 2020 Anna won the Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing and was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship. In 2018 she won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Her poetry chapbook The Last Postman (Vagabond Press, 2018) was published as part of the deciBel 3 series. She has been a finalist in the Brisbane Portrait Prize, Blake Art Prize and Marie Ellis Prize for Drawing.